July 28th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
Changes are coming to the search market. Several innovations are not only the horizon but are coming into play, and they have the power to reshape the search engine marketing space. Look for the de-emphasis of search engine optimization (SEO), as other forms of content — and thus other forms of search — gain prevalence.
July 19th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
Pushing for top placement in search results is as old as marketing itself, and it continues to be a priority. Internet marketers continue to recognize the importance of search in driving the end user’s internet browsing experience and understand that the odds of attracting a visitor (and the opportunity to convert) improve significantly with search engine placement.
June 28th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing, Solution Provider Services by tim
“Large” creeps its way into just about every social media marketing endeavor. Companies want legions of Facebook fans and Twitter followers. And a blog that isn’t highly trafficked and packed with comments almost feels neglected.
Resist the temptation to believe that big is beautiful, and refocus on marketing basics — you’ll get a greater return on your social media marketing investment.
June 23rd, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tom
When you rely on tools like Twitter to support your marketing efforts, you’re assuming a certain amount of risk: you can’t control the stability of the platform. As we’ve seen with Twitter’s recent capacity problems, you can lose access to 125 million people because the platform is rendered unavailable. The alternative, of course, would be to sacrifice access to that profound amount of users — with the ante for Facebook up around 500 million.
You can’t stay away, but you can’t simply accept that availability risk will be a part of your future. Fortunately, there’s some space in the middle. Check out our recent guest post on SocialTimes to learn four ways you can hedge against Twitter platform instability.
June 8th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
How do you handle social media marketing? Is it integrated into your overall marketing plan, or do you treat it separately?
If you go with the latter, you’re in the minority, according to a new study by MarketingSherpa. The research indicates that 52 percent of respondents integrate social media with both online and offline marketing tactics. Meanwhile, 31 percent integrate social media marketing efforts with online tactics only, with 1 percent integrating with offline only. Sixteen percent of the respondents integrate social media with any other marketing tactics.
These findings suggest that social media marketing is moving beyond the experimentation stage. Marketing departments realize that the environment can’t be ignored – and that it actually requires a substantial commitment.
Social media marketing is no longer a differentiator: it’s part of the price of admission to your market.
[Source: MarketingSherpa]
June 7th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tom
Twitter recently announced that it’s not letting users push their own advertisements and sponsored tweets through Twitter. While this is a rather specific act on Twitter’s part, it’s clear how any marketer may seem concerned. Could advertising be at the top of a slippery slope? If you’re worried … don’t. If anything, the Twitter prohibition on tweeted ads (except its own, of course), will help B2B marketers and others who use insights, expertise and experience as the meat in their communications with the market.
Twitter’s Big Change
For Twitter, marketing and advertising have evolved since its inception. What began with self-promotion turned into business promotion, ongoing marketing and then eh ale of space in your own tweet stream (i.e., advertising). For much of its existence, of course, Twitter had virtually no revenue and didn’t seem to have any prospects (or even interest) in changing that.
June 2nd, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
A year ago, the results of this MarketingSherpa survey would have looked a lot different. Nearly half of respondents indicated that “social media is a promising tactic and will eventually produce ROI” and are increasing budget conservatively. This may not seem exciting, but a “cautious” commitment is a commitment nonetheless. Only 17 percent replied that they aren’t going to invest in social media marketing.
Of course, the group of respondents increasing budget “liberally” is small, but that’s to be expected for a relatively new approach to marketing that many are still exploring. For 7 percent to invest fairly heavily in social media marketing is impressive, especially this early in the innovation cycle. The remaining 27 percent is neither increasing nor decreasing, responding, “Social media value is unknown and something we do only as time permits. Why invest more?”
May 31st, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
The growth in users sustained by major social media platforms means that some of the marketing tactics that have been pushed over the past few years are becoming less effective. Especially if you’re operating in a large market (such as virtualization or IP networking), the development of targeted audiences and communities may become quite difficult. Instead of trying to personalize the social media experience, therefore, it may make sense to do something that sounds strange — treat social media platforms like the internet as a whole.
The tactics that you used on the pre-social media web, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and direct marketing against large lists, are more useful now than ever before ii particularly if you use them within a social media platform. Check out enter:marketing’s recent guest post on SocialTimes, one of the top social media blogs, to learn more about how you can use the marketing tactics you know well in the social media space.
[Source: SocialTimes]
May 19th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tom
It’s natural to want to entertain or inform your readers with the best content you can put together. Rather than push a product, the conventional wisdom holds, you want to engage, interact and make the world a better place for your clients.
And you do. You really do want these things. The only problem, of course, is that such lofty ideals aren’t free, and you’re the one stuck with the tab. So, you need to generate some revenue, and your corporate blog is one of the ways you do that.
To get the most out of your blog, however, you need to find that middle ground between pure advertising and pure news/information/education. Essentially, you need blog content that can unobtrusively deliver an engagement opportunity while still delivering value to your target market.
May 18th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing, Solution Provider Services by tim
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
12:30 – 1:15 pm EST
Back by Popular Demand! Attend this webinar if you’re wondering how Social Media Marketing can impact your IT business.
Tim Freestone, enter:marketing Vice President, will walk you through the best practices for getting started in social media IT channel marketing, from planning to building a community and managing your social media platforms for eventual ROI.
You’ll learn:
If you’re not in the social media space, you should be – and this webinar will be your first step. If you are in this space and struggling, help has arrived and it’s in the form of this webinar! Don’t miss out.
